Saturday, January 9, 2010

Philosophy of Cognitive Science

I'm under contract to prepare the Philosophy of Cognitive Science entry for the new project, Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy. Over the next week or so I'll be posting draft chunks so interested Hammer Heads can weigh in on any egregious omissions or regrettable inclusions. For starters, I present for your perusal the working basic category structure.

Introduction

General overviews

Textbooks/reference works

Anthologies

Cognitive architecture

Classicism and language of thought

Connectionism

Modularity

Ontological status of cognitive scientific and folk-psychological posits

Eliminativism

Reductionism

Functionalism

Philosophy of neuroscience

Theory of content

Mental imagery

Innateness

Simulation theory v. theory theory

Critiques and challenges

Consciousness

Embodiment

Antirepresentationalism and dynamic systems

AI skepticism

2 comments:

  1. A few thoughts.

    (i) It seems very odd to have philosophy of neuroscience but not philosophy of linguistics, AI, psychology (I'd add them).

    (ii) It's likewise odd to have mental imagery but not other topics such as perception, memory, language, emotion (I'd probably drop them all for your purposes). Especially when the heyday of the imagery debate was decades ago now.

    (iii) The boundaries of philosophy of cognitive science are tricky, but I'd have thought that core theory of content is really more part of the philosophy of mind. For this entry I'd be tempted to instead have a section on representation in cognitive science.

    (iv) For a nicer structure withot the stray categories, how about combining "critiques and challenges" (perhaps minus AI skepticism and antirepresentationalism, if you followed the suggestions above) with a few of the preceding entries (innateness, theory of mind) under "Special topics". It's not as if consciousness, embodiment, dynamic systems are only relevant to cognitive science as critiques/challenges in any case.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Those are quite helpful suggestions, Dave. I'll think on 'em. Mucho gracias!

    P.S. Any news on the phil of cog sci reader idea you were think out loud about on your blog a while back?

    ReplyDelete